In the production of bars, for instance steel rein-forcement bars, it is standard to continuously cast a metal strand, cut it into relatively long billets, roll the billets into bars of the desired sectional shape, and finally to cut the bars into the desired trade lengths. The strand is cut into billets because it is virtually impossible to deal with the extremely long strand as it exits the continuous-casting apparatus. Normally also the rolling mill is not located close enough to receive the continuously cast strand directly and in any case the low speed of the rolling mill cannot match the outlet speed of the strand from the continuous caster.
The billets are normally of a standardized length that is in turn a multiple of a desired finish trade length, corrected of course for the length increase encountered with rolling, but the last billet produced from a continuously cast strand is invariably shorter than this desired trade length. This short piece creates a problem that is dealt with, for instance, in the system of German patent document 3,636,785 by cutting it to a length equal to a multiple of the desired finish length before further treatment. Although such a procedure is a substantial improvement on the procedure of simply manually culling out and recycling the overshort piece it is relatively complex and requires special equipment.